Well, somebody has to start with the holiday dancing. It may be inevitable. But you can only hope it will be good. Give Diablo Ballet a hand for introducing this festive season in dance and doing it with a classy verve that makes Sean Kelly's "Swingin' Holiday" stand out from the other pop yuletide confections. The premiere, Friday at Walnut Creek's Lesher Center for the Arts, marked Diablo's 19th season opener.

The company has a little hit on its hands, and somebody in the hierarchy is probably hitting his head against a wall today for not scheduling more performances this season.

Be sure it will return. Kelly, known for his Broadway contributions and work with the Houston Ballet, has given his eight ballet types a crash course in swing dancing and backed them with a dozen spiffy jazz arrangements of holiday songs by Greg Sudmeier, dispatched in the pit by the Diablo Ballet Swing Orchestra, a group whose enthusiasm seemed boundless.

There's a touch of the period in the garishly colored zoot suits worn by Derek Sakakura and Robert Dekkers as they bop down the aisle in pursuit of their pom-pom prey. The facsimile of a swing-era nightclub abounds in clean dancing and some rapturous partnering, and it unfurls in an atmosphere of sweet innocence. I'm still wondering how Aaron Orza (once of the San Francisco Ballet) hoists Mayo Sugano without an accident. Edward Stegge bounced around as the boy in blue. Jennifer Friele Dille and Rosselyn Ramirez completed the team.

What made "Swingin' Holiday" so endearing were the dancers' clean attacks and lack of self-consciousness in re-creating a vital era of social dance history.

Programming Kelly's piece to follow a re-creation of José Limón's "Moor's Pavane" seemed an act of daring. This 1949 retelling of the Othello story, a classic of American modern dance, is increasingly making inroads into the ballet world, though its roots and canny deployment of weight are in modernism.

The Diablo performances were produced by sjDANCEco, beautifully reconstructed and directed by Gary Masters and Raphael Boumaila and featured Heather Cooper and Maria Basile, both from the South Bay company as, respectively, the Moor's Wife and His Friend's Wife.

Even in this cool restoration, "The Moor's Pavane" retained its powerful allure. Organizing this tragic tale as a series of ancient dances rubs formality against seething passion, intensifying it the way naturalism never could. Limón wanted every gesture to resound as an image for the ages, and he mostly succeeded. When the Iago figure (Dekkers here, and excellent) leaps upon Othello's back, wrapping his legs around the hero's, the moment says everything about envy as an addiction.

I only wish Sakakura had been a more memorable Moor. The moves were there, but not the explosive passion or the animalistic vulnerability that Limón and others have brought to their assignment. The Purcell music was recorded.